


your names beside mine

by ryyves



Category: King Falls AM (Podcast)
Genre: Domestic, M/M, Mention of sex, Multi, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:07:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24949693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryyves/pseuds/ryyves
Summary: In the three days Jack has been home, Ben hasn’t seen him once.
Relationships: Ben Arnold & Jack Wright, Ben Arnold & Lily Wright, Ben Arnold & Sammy Stevens, Sammy Stevens/Jack Wright
Comments: 15
Kudos: 95





	your names beside mine

**Author's Note:**

> Remember not our faulty pieces, remember not our rusted parts.  
> It's not the petty imperfections that define us  
> but the way we hold our hearts, and the way we hold our heads.  
> I hope they write your names beside mine  
> on my gravestone when I'm dead.  
> — La Dispute, Nine
> 
> * * *
> 
> I was supposed to be planning for NaNo, but I dreamt that Jack returned and didn't come out of Sammy's room for a week so I had to write a very short little something.

In the three days Jack has been home, Ben hasn’t seen him once. _Home_ meaning Ben and Sammy’s apartment, overcrowded already with Lily on the couch. _Home_ meaning Sammy saying, “Let’s go home,” whispering really, and Jack mouthing the word back at him. Jack’s voice was a moth’s wing; his eyes were a moth’s eyes, closing. His hair grown out in tangles around his elbows.

Jack fell asleep in the car home, in the backseat beside Sammy. Sammy folded the blanket he carried in his car trunk around Jack’s shoulders before Jack nodded off, while Ben drove slowly through the uneven roads of King Falls so as not to wake him. Ben was the only one who wouldn’t swerve while crying, but he was crying too. Jack’s eyes were bruised purple, and his hair smelled like a forest at night — like growing things, like rotting things. It filled up the car. Ben kept checking him in the rearview. None of them said anything.

Because Ben’s place was a two-story complex, it didn’t have an elevator, so Sammy carried Jack bridal-style up the outdoor stairwell. The blanket, still tucked around Jack’s frame, swung against Sammy’s knees. Jack curled his fingers around Sammy’s neck. Ben kept watching Sammy’s shoulders to make sure he was remembering to breathe.

Ben unlocked the door and swung it open for Sammy, and then he looked for Lily. He wanted to go in last; he wanted to close the door on this whole affair, so many years of heartbreak. He wanted to flick the lock and say, _Welcome home._ He shouldn’t be the one to say it.

Lily was still at the car, looking like a high school student sneaking a cigarette. But there was no flare of ember, the headlights still going dim around her thighs, her arms wrapped around her body. Ben leaned over the railing and beckoned.

“You okay?” he whispered when she reached the door.

“My brother,” she said. The awe of it, the terror. “My brother.”

The house, when they entered it, was dark, except for the hall light and Sammy’s bedroom. Ben went and stood between his bedroom and Sammy’s, unsure of where to go next and deferring to Sammy. Sammy had laid Jack on the bed and was tucking the covers around him. While Ben watched, Sammy stooped and kissed Jack: on his forehead, his temples, the corners of his lips.

“Thank you,” Sammy said.

He looked at Ben and Lily with eyes darker than Ben had ever seen them, or maybe brighter.

For three days, Lily has been talking about getting her own place. For three days, Lily has been quiet, her voice an approximation of Jack’s voice, soft as deer tracks through snow, or overloud, as if compensating. Ben’s place isn’t really big enough for four people, and Sammy’s room only has space for a single bed. For three days, Ben has run the Sammy and Ben Show sans Sammy, fielding long nights of a town abuzz over Jack, while his throat seized up.

Ben doesn’t know if the door to Sammy’s room has opened at all. He knocks at every meal, both on his schedule and on Lily’s — he cooks every meal, too, sometimes with Lily. She knows Jack’s favorite foods, but she tells Ben that she doesn’t know if they still are. The food doesn’t seem to go quicker with another person in the house. Ben looks up an overnight oats recipe online and starts making four.

Jack doesn’t come out for meals. Sammy does, sometimes; takes down two plates, fills one with a child’s portion, and microwaves them before vanishing back into the bedroom. If Ben is lucky, he can catch Sammy, his expression so worn, so worried. Ben can say, “How is he?”

Sammy can swallow and glance at the kitchen wall, on the other side of which Jack is tucked into the center of Sammy’s bed, the red comforter pulled up to his chin or higher. Like a child with a fever, maybe, or a cat hiding from a thunderstorm.

“It’s hard,” Sammy tells Ben. His voice plaintive, split like amber. The kitchen is too small, the apartment too small. “He’s different. He’s hurt, and I don’t know what to do.”

Ben wants to say, _Is he the same Jack?_ But it catches behind his teeth. Instead, he says, “You’re doing your best. That’s what matters.”

“But is it enough?” Sammy hasn’t changed his pajamas in days, and his hair hangs knotted around his neck and past his shoulders.

“It’s enough,” says Ben. Sammy looks at him with hollow eyes that Ben says again, more confidently, “It’s enough. Trust me.”

“Yeah,” says Sammy absently. “Yeah.” He balances the plates between his hands and arms, silverware scraping across ceramic.

Ben says, “Is he going to come out?”

“Give him time.” And then, “I don’t know.”

“It’s okay,” says Ben. “We’re all here for both of you.”

Sammy sighs and blows at some hair that has fallen in his eyes, his hands occupied by the plates. “We appreciate it. We’re… we’re really damn grateful, honestly.”

Ben sleeps with the door open, so he can see if Sammy’s door opens at the other end of the hall. Sometimes he catches a glimpse of Jack’s body passing between bedroom and bathroom, the yellow flash of light sudden and just as suddenly extinguished. If Ben stirs, Jack jumps, a violent motion that seems to go straight to Jack’s heart. Jack may have left the shadow, but the shadow hasn’t left him. He is insubstantial in every other light, and he tiptoes through the apartment as though he doesn’t belong there. As if the shape of a house is as unfamiliar as a wild animal.

Sometimes, when leaving his room, Ben hears Sammy’s hushed voice and long periods of silence in between. If he listens, he can hear any conversation: wood walls, narrow building, his bedroom down the hall from Sammy’s and the kitchen on the other side of the wall.

“Shh. Shh. I’ve got you,” Sammy is whispering. Ben pauses in the hall, knowing he shouldn’t.

Ben hears a few mumbled words, soft as anything and slow, halting.

And then it’s Sammy again. “I know. You don’t have to talk about it.” A pause. “I’ll tell you all about it. That’s a promise. But I don’t…” and then something indistinct. “I don’t want to drag you back there.”

Jack’s voice, indistinct. _You won’t._

“Okay,” says Sammy.

Ben tiptoes into the bathroom and turns the faucet on, quick. In rinsing his face, he misses several sentences. In the living room, Lily’s eyes are bright as a cat’s. She is listening, just like him. She makes some gesture which Ben takes to mean, _You and me both._ His curly hair drips all over his face, until his reflection looks like crying. He dries his head with the hand towel, the sound of it a roar in his ears.

“I love you,” says Sammy, and says it again until it turns into a song. “I never stopped loving you. I never stopped. Don’t think that.”

Silence; the low riptide of a murmur.

Sammy’s voice breaks. “I’m so sorry. Please, Jack. You _are_ real. You’re real and you’re here and you’re mine. And there’s nothing I want more than you.” A pause; Ben imagines Jack gulping in breaths while his voice comes out soft as a coin landing in his palm. “Yeah. Even like this. Especially like this, because it means you’re back with me.”

Ben raises his hand to knock, and then he puts his hand down. This isn’t his conversation to enter, to listen in on, to wait in the wings of the apartment while Jack and Sammy’ voices slide through the rooms. Ben looks back at Lily, then goes back into his room. He sits with his feet on the bedframe and his elbows on his knees. The house is full but not busy, Ben and Lily waking to the sounds of voices, of Sammy talking Jack Wright home.

“Here,” says Sammy. “I’m gonna get you something to eat, and some more water.”

The door creaks open, blue nightlight glow rushing out and over Ben and Lily. Sammy doesn’t notice them at first, the bed mountainous behind him, his eyes dark. An empty glass swings from one hand. It’s a few hours before work, but Sammy isn’t coming and Lily’s only coming for an excuse to get out of the house. Ben shows up every day. He doesn’t want Sammy to think Ben is imposing himself. If Jack needs quiet, needs solitude, needs weeks curled up in bed, sometimes against Sammy and sometimes with the comforter pulled up over his head, he’s certainly been through enough to deserve it.

“Sammy,” says Ben, soft enough that he wouldn’t wake a child.

Sammy stops in the hallway. He glances back at the open door and then to Ben. His voice is weary and apologetic. “Did we wake you?”

“No,” says Ben. Lily says nothing. “You’re not sleeping, are you?”

“Jack can’t stay asleep for more than a couple of hours. You understand?”

“I understand.” But that doesn’t mean Jack isn’t a ghost in their house.

Sammy stares at Ben for a few moments before he disappears into the kitchen. The apartment fills with the sound of water running. A waterfall, rustling leaves cacophonous in Perdition Wood, Jack’s breath as miraculous as a butterfly’s wings. The animal silence; the gasp. Stars falling on them like glass.

And slowly, slowly, as the days go by, Ben hears more of Jack’s voice. With the door closed, Ben can’t make out the voice’s quality, the scrape in his throat, but it is warm and soft and thoughtful. Ben wakes up with the door closed and hears Jack and Sammy’s hushed murmurs, the middle of long conversations which end long after Ben has left for work and start long before. He doesn’t say a word to Sammy about it.

“I was right,” Jack is saying.

Sammy laughs, a golden sound. The sun through drawn blinds has nothing on Sammy’s laugh.

“I was right about everything, and you got to see it first.” Jack laughs, too. It is the first time Ben has heard him laugh. “You, the skeptic.”

“I wish I could have seen it for the first time with you.”

A long silence. Evergreens strike the side of the building, their needles like fingernails on the glass. Then Jack says, “Me, too.”

All these conversations are punctuated by quiet, the heavy weight of words reached for and released, the soundless landscape of hands on hands.

“Then we’ll do it. We’ll see everything, for the first time. We’ll discover King Falls the way we were supposed to. And you won’t—ever—have to feel like I don’t support you, or believe you.”

“You changed the world for me,” says Jack, in wonder.

“I missed you,” says Sammy. “More than anything. More than… everything. My fiancé. My Jack Wright.”

* * *

It is always the same voice that rises wordless from that small corner bedroom, and it takes days for Ben to figure out whose it is. He has never heard Sammy sound like that before, and he’s hardly heard Jack sound like anything. Jack’s eyes the color of autumn, orange-brown, trying to speak and then coughing black oil into his hand. His hand all over Sammy the night they brought him home; his hands all over Sammy.

In the living room, Lily is just a shape under the sofabed covers, a pillow pressed over her ears. When Ben sits beside her, she removes the pillow, underneath which she wears a pair of heavy audio-production headphones.

Ben reaches out and taps them. Lily opens her eyes and pulls an exaggerated face.

“Be good to your equipment,” Ben mouths, and Lily extracts a hand to flip him the bird. He says, “You want to get out of here?”

She pulls an expression, and says, “What do you think?”

The wind strikes them the moment Ben unlocks the front door, and with it goes their chance of stealing out unnoticed.

On instinct, they stay away from the woods. They walk to a small dog park a few streets over and sit on its low fence, scraping long grooves in the soil. Ben’s shoes are better suited for the endeavor than Lily’s.

“He’s an adult and he can do whatever he wants,” says Lily, her neck craned up, staring down the 10 p.m. moon. “And I know if I were stuck in the Void for years, I’d want to bang my fiancée, if I had one, as often and as loudly as possible. But that doesn’t mean I want to hear it.”

Ben laughs. Then, and maybe it’s just the night making him serious, he says, “Are you okay? You and Jack?”

“Why wouldn’t we be?”

“I don’t know,” says Ben, and watches his shoes. “Maybe because you tiptoe around them as much as I do. Even though none of us really have a reason to.”

Lily says, her voice as cold as the moon, “He’s Sammy’s. Right now he needs to be Sammy’s. I can respect that.”

“I don’t think that’s right. I think he needs all of us. You’re family.”

“You’re not.” It’s almost surprised.

“I want to be.”

“Then what are you doing?” He can hear the raised eyebrow in her voice. She shifts and leans back, resting her palms on the fence.

Ben levels her with a steady gaze, her eyes darker than the shadows gathering beneath her chin, in the hollow of her mouth. “Making a resolution. What about you?”

She looks at him, but her expression says she doesn’t want to. With the streetlights behind her, her face is darker than anything, even her pale teeth, the whites of her eyes. When she speaks, her voice carries a trace of a whine. “I’m trying. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh, so it’s some sibling thing.” He straightens and wraps his arms around his waist.

She raises her chin. Her sigh is the wind. “It’s… it’s not some sibling thing. It’s, I haven’t been his sister for longer than he’s been gone.”

“Oh,” says Ben again, and it means something different, and it’s insufficient.

“And what I remember of being a sister is from almost a decade ago. Even if none of this happened and they just walked out, I wouldn’t know the person he was.”

Ben hops off the fence. He takes a few steps into the dog park and half-turns, so he can just see her out of the corner of his eye, if he’s looking. This is a place to drop everything and run into, that King Falls sky burning with stars, evergreens sharp as the needle a mother uses to pry out a splinter. “I’m sure that’s not true.”

“I appreciate your optimism.” Her voice is biting. “But I’m not the sister he had, either, and I can see he knows that when he looks at me. We’re strangers, and that’s the worst fucking thing in the whole world.”

When Ben turns, the distance between them is less an ocean and more just a space between them,

“You’re not strangers,” he tells Lily. “I know. Someone I loved forgot she ever knew me. Someone you know, too. You have a future, you and Jack. You have a future, okay? You’re still his sister.”

But Lily has closed her eyes and doesn’t open them even when Ben takes her hands and pulls her to her feet.

“What are you going to do, Lily Wright?” he says, and it sounds like a challenge.

She opens her eyes, dark as churned sand. “I made my peace with Sammy,” she says, as if this is the end of it. “I’m making my peace with Jack.”

* * *

Though Sammy starts coming in to work, he pulls into the lot the moment the on-air sign comes on and slouches in with Ben mid-sentence. As soon as the lights flicker off, Sammy is out the door. Ben barely makes it to the front door in time to see Sammy hit the gas, gravel churned up behind him. Sometimes Ben wants to believe, petulant as a child, that Sammy is avoiding him, but he knows better.

“Are you afraid?” Ben asks him one day. They’re in the apartment, the only place Ben can pin Sammy down, Sammy’s arms up to his elbows in dish suds.

Sammy has frightened eyes, blue like a seafloor, so Ben knows what he’s going to say. “Yes.”

“I mean,” says Ben, and isn’t sure he wants to finish the question. But Sammy is looking at him, so he says, “That you could lose him again.”

“I have so much time to make up.”

“Oh. Okay. I just thought. I mean, you’re okay, right?”

Sammy appraises him, his eyes dark and flat. The sound he makes isn’t a laugh, but could be. “I’m… I don’t remember being this good. Ever, actually.”

“That’s good,” says Ben.

“I have a real family, a whole family. I’m not hiding anything from anyone, and it’s not as terrifying as I always thought it would be. Whatever’s broken, it’s not going to be broken forever.” He sighs. “I know this. But I also know how easily it can happen. One heartbeat, one… you close your eyes and when you open them? If I told you ‘everything’s changed,’ that doesn’t tell you how much _everything_ is.” Sammy pulls his hands out of the sink and holds them up as though to illustrate the enormity of _everything,_ the things he is reaching for and not quite grasping. “I love him, I love him more than anything, so I don’t want to say _but_ anything, but, God, it’s so hard. Hurting for him in a brand-new way. It’s… it’s scary, Ben.”

“I know,” says Ben. His hand is on Sammy’s arm before he realizes it. Sammy twitches—suds everywhere like stars, glittering, falling—and then his hand is over Ben’s, warm from the water and warmer still by the intensity with which Sammy grips him. With his hair in a tight knot at the base of his skull, Sammy’s face looks so young, open as a sky split with stars.

Sammy looks at Ben and Ben looks back, both of them so close to crying.

Ben says, again, “I know.”

* * *

Jack has been home for a week, and Ben is standing in front of Jack and Sammy’s room preparing to knock when the door opens. It’s Jack, a sweater draped over his atrophied frame. _He played rugby,_ Ben remembers Sammy saying, once. Jack’s hair is hacked off unevenly along the long slope of his neck, shadows gathering beneath it. Sammy is running a hand through it, across the back of Jack’s neck, even as both of them look at Ben

“Hi. Um. Hi,” says Ben. “Am I… in the way of something?”

For a moment, headlight eyes. Then Jack smiles, skeletal but gentle and warm. The sort of smile you could bruise if you touched it. One of Sammy’s earbuds sits in his ear, the other coiled around his finger. The cord snakes into his pocket, the corner of Sammy’s phone poking out.

Jack laughs, a thin, rough sound. “No, I guess at some point I was going to bump into you, huh?”

“I don’t… understand,” says Ben.

Jack presses his lips together, his tongue shifting inside his mouth. He reaches up and pushes a lock of his choppy hair off his forehead, but it doesn’t stretch to his ear. His eyes trace its motion, not looking at Ben.

“Tiptoe like the ghost I am.”

“You’re not a ghost,” says Sammy, so quick he must have practice dispelling this same fear, those long, sleepless conversations.

“Sure.” Jack’s voice is so airy Ben isn’t sure he’s heard Sammy. Ben is beginning to think he shouldn’t be here at all, standing in this doorway, watching this man who’d lost years and everything besides struggle with words. Watching Sammy watch Jack, eyes never once turning to Ben.

“We could get a razor,” Ben offers, because he needs something to say. “For a buzz cut?”

As though looking straight at Ben is too much effort, Jack’s eyes drop. “This is fine,” he rasps. “A little heavy, but…”

“What he means,” says Sammy. Without looking, Jack puts up a hand.

“It’s okay, baby. I can handle a conversation with your best friend. It’s not going to wear me out.”

Sammy glances at Jack. Jack twitches his fingers, some lovers’ signal, and Sammy removes his hand from Jack’s neck and takes it, relaxing as he does so. Jack closes his eyes for a long moment, swaying on his feet.

“Sammy cut it,” Jack explains, in that soft, pale voice. “He does his own hair—started, what, damn, I forget. A few years after we met, anyway—but I kept twitching.”

Sammy is looking at Jack with alarm the longer Jack speaks, and when Jack pauses to gasp, Sammy pulls him closer. Jack shifts his head, seeking the most comfortable position, his eyes falling shut for a long time.

“Not trying to rain on your hair-cutting abilities,” amends Ben.

“We’re gonna try again when he’s feeling more up to it,” says Sammy. “It was giving him headaches. It wasn’t the time for artistry.”

“Too much talking,” Jack murmurs.

“You or me, babe?”

“Uh.” Jack shifts, rubs his eyes. The earbud falls out of his ear and swings between him and Ben, a pendulum. Quick, ask a question. _How deep does the dark go?_ Jack rubbing black oil out of his eyes. “Both, I guess.”

But before Sammy can steer them both back into the bedroom, Jack says, “One more thing. Ben.” He looks so small beside Sammy, even though there are only a few inches between them, his shoulders drawn under his oversized sweater, his hair making his gaunt face gaunter.

“Yeah?”

Jack looks at Ben with eyes so dark, so calm, so intense that Ben shivers. Jack could look through him with eyes like that. Voice thin and soft, Jack says, “Thank you for taking care of Sammy.”

* * *

And one day, closing the front door and tossing the keys onto the hall table, Ben hears Lily’s voice and Jack’s in that unbreaking, incessant rumble that only siblings can access. Jack’s voice is stronger, now, a rich tenor, warm as freshly baked cookies. He smiles more, spends more time in less-furtive snatches in the living room and the kitchen, but he still watches where he’s going as if he can’t remember the shape of the apartment.

The voices don’t stop when the door shuts. Ben has to pass through the living room to reach his bedroom, but there’s an uncanny intensity in both voices and he can’t bring himself to stir up that air, so he waits in the dark hall, not taking off his coat but not moving forward either. He doesn’t try to overhear, but he’s weighing his choices.

“I come home—” Jack is saying, and he does say home, he does “—and everyone knows everything about me. I’m really just surprised my blood type and moon sign aren’t there on the list of things King Falls knows about Jack that I’m not always sure I know about myself.”

“Your moon sign,” laughs Lily.

“Okay, you laugh,” Jack protests, and it sounds so natural, so easy. “But you can’t believe in… in Archie’s werewolves and Kingsie and Sammy _fucking_ Stevens and all of you changing the world without believing that maybe, just maybe, moon signs are real.”

“You shut up,” says Lily, affectionate. “Only real things are real.”

Ben starts to feel bad, lingering in the hallway, taking too long with his shoelaces when he should leave them tied and pass through to avoid any future awkwardness.

Jack is saying, “So you have to understand that I already feel like I’m not my own person, not entirely, because this whole town has this idea of me and I don’t… measure up.”

Lily’s voice breaks. “Jack. You don’t have to measure up to anyone’s expectations. None of that matters.”

“It does,” Jack insists, and then he falls silent, as though quieted by a finger raised to his lips.

“I don’t care if you _measure up_ to the Jack I knew before we hated each other—”

“I didn’t hate you,” Jack says.

“—because you’re here and you’re Jack Wright and you’re wonderful. Okay? You’re wonderful.”

Dubiously, Jack says, “Okay.”

Lily isn’t finished. “You’re my brother, even if this sibling thing is hard and bad a lot of the time. Even though I don’t remember the last time I was your sister the right way.”

“And good a lot of the time, too.”

Lily sighs. “Yeah. And good. Pretty damn good. So, can I?”

An uneasy silence stretches between them.

“Can you what?” says Jack, apprehensive.

“Be your sister again?”

Ben can’t bear to listen to this, to their story spun out like stars and told without the recognition of an audience. He takes the plunge and enters the living room. Jack and Lily sit on Lily’s bed, Jack in his pajamas with his hair held back by one of Sammy’s headbands, the overhead off and the tall lamp casting reddish haloes around their heads. They look up at him: Lily’s harsh veneer falls over her face, while Jack looks blank. Jack rises, but Lily takes his hand.

“It’s just Ben,” she says.

“I know,” says Jack. “I just… maybe need a bit of time to put my heart back together. Sorry. I mean my head, I think.”

Lily watches him with a strange look in her eyes as, wordless, he ghosts into his room and closes the door. He doesn’t slam it like a teenager, but the click nonetheless echoes through an apartment too small to hold four people, and just big enough.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” says Ben. “I was coming home and…”

“Yeah,” says Lily.

“You two okay?”

And Lily smiles, her dimples resting beside the corners of her mouth. “Things are what they are, but, yeah, I think so.”

“That’s good,” says Ben, and, because he still feels like an intruder, retreats to his bedroom.

An hour or two later, a knock comes at Ben’s door.

“Come in,” Ben calls. The door swings open. Ben has a book propped between the bedposts and the wall so he can read in bed with ease, without the strain on his arms for holding the book aloft. The book falls when Ben turns to see Jack in the doorway. “Hey.”

“Mind if I?” Jack asks.

Ben says of course not so Jack enters the room fully, swings the desk chair around so he can rest his arms and chin on its back like a high schooler. He’s still having trouble keeping his eyes open, his eyes little hollows, so Ben says, “You don’t have to look at me.”

Jack murmurs something unrecognizable and puts his chin on his arms, eyes closed.

“Sammy’s going to have a heart attack when he finds out you’ve been prowling the house,” says Ben, when nothing has been spoken for a full minute.

Jack grins, but it’s strained. “It isn’t like that. I got tired—I get tired—when I talk too much, or do too much. Of anything, really. I fall asleep mid-sentence, or mid-word; I can barely make it into the hall without getting dizzy. It’s a little embarrassing, sure, but I’d take any amount of embarrassment to not be _there_ anymore.”

The chill of the word runs through them. Ben pulls himself up until he’s sitting on the bed, eye level with Jack, watching him and unsure what to say.

“I know I’m the only one who didn’t know you before,” says Ben, tentative. Jack blinks his eyes open and holds them steady on Ben. Jack’s hands worrying the edge of his t-shirt, Jack’s jaw clenching and unclenching. Jack’s runaway hair sticking to his brow, his temples, the few days’ stubble around his chin.

Jack says, “It’s nice, actually. I’m just… whatever I am now, to you.” He laughs, soft and short. “You’re not missing anything. In me. I’m not an empty space to you.”

Ben opens his mouth and closes it. “I didn’t mean—”

“I know,” says Jack, honestly. “And I’m not bitter. It’s just… history is a tricky thing. Like how I’m never going to know all of your history with Sammy—” and the way he says _Sammy,_ like it’s the sweetest word in the world “—no matter how much he tells me, and that’s okay. But.” He takes a deep, soft breath and closes his eyes again. “It’s weird that I’m the reason why you met and I just met you.”

“It’s a weird situation,” Ben agrees. “But the family’s together.”

“The family,” Jack mumbles. His fingers fall loose from the chair back.

Ben says, “Jack?”

Jack’s eyes blink open and fall shut, again and again.

“Come on. Let’s get you off that chair.” Careful not to move the chair, Ben stands beside it until Jack twitches, an arm reaching up for Ben. Ben helps Jack to his feet, helps him the few steps to the bed.

Jack falls heavily onto it, and Ben pries the comforter out from beneath him. He tucks it beneath Jack’s chin, Jack’s eyes soft and alight as tree bark after a rainstorm. Jack reaches, frantic, for Ben’s hand. He holds it tight, his fingers soft and clammy, as though seeking a lifeline in Ben from the dangers of sleep.

“You’re not an empty space. Not to me, not to anyone,” says Ben, and Jack’s hand in his twitches.

“Yeah, I know,” murmurs Jack. “No one’s an empty space.”

And when Jack closes his eyes and relaxes his neck, Ben doesn’t let go.


End file.
